Amok: An Anthology of Asia-Pacific Speculative Fiction

by Dominica Malcolm

  The arm seemed to have no designs for Tanuki. It propelled itself instead on its fingers back toward the demon it belonged to.

  With no time to consider the danger, Tanuki threw himself onto the tailing arm and wedged the end of his walking stick between the bones of its wrist. The tip of the stick dug deep into the ground, staking the limb to the earth and the arm—having stuck itself back together again—couldn’t disassemble away from the foreign object, nor could it lift itself high enough to free itself.

  “Onigawara! The hand! The hand!” Tanuki yelled again, but the gargoyle was out of sight.

  The odokuro howled its frustration, drowning out Tanuki’s shouts of alarm in a screaming clang of bells. Even if he could raise his voice over the cacophony, the thrashing of the limb under him made holding on a difficult enough task.

  “Onigawara!”

  Without warning the disembodied limb bucked up and threw Tanuki clear into the air.

  Time around him seemed to slow to a crawl.

  Higher than the juniper, the wall—even higher than the roof—Tanuki had never been so high in his life. The view was amazing. The bright red pillars of the shrine down the street were visible, even with the lights of the three-story shopping centre framing it from behind. In the distance there were even a few green points of light—fireflies—moving on for the season to the secret place of gods and kami.

  How different things were when looking down, rather than up. This must be how Onigawara saw the world—stretched out before him in humbling vastness. Tanuki’s life might have been very different if he’d sat with his friend on the roof, even once. He could have, if he’d tried. He could have climbed the juniper and walked the wall. He could have—

  Time snapped out of its slow motion drift. Tail-first, Tanuki slammed onto the edge of the roof and spun down through the air before shattering on the flagstone steps in front of the porch. The mournful crash of a jolly piece of pottery was swallowed up by the clacks of scattering bones as Onigawara made the final blow on the odokuro’s left shoulder. The demon howled but defenceless, it could do little else.

  Onigawara wasted no time.

  Climbing over twisting vertebrae he hooked his feet into the back of the demon’s skull and hacked away at its neck. The demon screeched and thrashed but Onigawara could not be dislodged; with a final, terrible blow, he cut the head from the odokuro.

  A bell tolled and echoed over the wall. The skull and all its stolen bones disappeared, and Onigawara was thrown head over heels through the garden. He lost an arm at the base of the juniper, and both legs on the stones of the koi pond where inertia bounced him up and dropped him into the endless green.

  §

  Kentaro arrived at seven twenty-four the next morning in a crisp black suit and matching tie. Armed with a briefcase full of paperwork he faced the home of his late father and in his head drew figures and calculations and projections of the worth of the land without the antique building that sat on it.

  In the garden he did the same; he took notes of the property lines and the meterage, inspected the alley behind the half collapsed eastern wall and kicked aside the broken pottery that might trip the brokers who would come to view the house.

  Half of a plump tanuki face spun off into the weeds, its wide grin belying its pitiable state.

  “This place is a death trap. I don’t know how it didn’t kill my father years ago.”

  Mounting the steps to the porch, he slid open the door and trod on the tail of a cat napping in a patch of morning sunlight. It screeched and hissed but before it could escape, Kentaro had it by its nape.

  “Goddamnit, Shizuho. Stop taking in strays,” he muttered and evicted it out the door.

  Offended, the cat sat in front of the porch, refusing to be rushed, and passed its tongue fourteen times over its left paw and six times over its right. Its point made, it stood and followed the trail of stressed and crushed weeds to the cheerful, skyward smile of the broken tanuki. “That man, indeed, has no respect,” it said and swished its tail thoughtfully westward.

  “Let’s go,” it said at last, and picking up the shard of pottery, it mounted the fallen juniper before disappearing over the crumbled wall.

  A solitary firefly winked once in agreement and followed after it.

  * * *

  About NJ Magas

  Born and raised in Canada, NJ Magas now lives in Kyoto, Japan with a dog, a bird, a tortoise, and her spouse. She writes when she should be sleeping, walks when she should be writing, and practices Japanese fencing when she needs something else to do. She’s not sure that she’s ever seen a ceramic tanuki come to life, but is convinced that if it’s going to happen it’ll be at the temple behind her house where she spends a lot of time observing, thinking, and coffee drinking. NJ Magas reviews the books she reads on her blog, http://njmagas.wordpress.com among other things. You can also follow her on Twitter @njmagas.

  The King of Flotsamland

  Tom Barlow

  ~ North Pacific Gyre~

  When I heard the butter butter butter of a helicopter approaching from the east, I dropped the fish netting I’d been untangling and strolled over to Baggie Beach. The previous afternoon, Koo, worried, had tipped me that Midas Recycling was sending out a consultant to find out why she and her harvester crew had failed to meet their monthly production quota. Again.

  I was hoping the consultant would haul her and the rest of the crew back to the mainland for their winter furlough. Once the harvester was abandoned until spring, I would be free to leave Flotsamland myself and return to San Diego. My monthly resupply flight from the Fair Share Gaea group was due on Sunday, and I could hitch a ride home with them.

  The Sikorsky settled onto the deck of the cargo ship a thousand yards from my floating trash-pile kingdom. That ship was already half-full of pieces of the island, chewed away by the harvester in August, while I was incapacitated by an infected cut on my foot. Mr Pepsodent, the largest of the neighbourhood sharks that hung around hoping for a taste of Harry (I’m Harry), swam by on his way to check out the noise.

  I lifted the binoculars I’d found in a month before in the hatch of a half-a-sailboat just as the helicopter door swung open. A tall, cadaverous man in safety-orange coveralls jumped to the deck. He appeared to be about my age, mid-thirties, with extremely long legs and a long face, like a wax model left in the sun. He scowled at Koo as she approached, the rest of her crew trailing several paces behind. Two of them were wheeling their sea chests, just in case.

  Cadaver Man and Koo immediately started to argue, she on her tiptoes, arms crossed. Anger can ruin some women’s looks, but she was as fetching as ever. The man brushed her aside, though, and strode to the superstructure, then up the outside ladder to the bridge. Koo followed, still carping at him.

  To my dismay, the Sikorsky took off again a short time later, carrying no passengers. It disappeared over the eastern horizon, taking with it at least a month of my winter vacation.

  That evening I was walking the three-mile perimeter of my island nation to see what new, interesting trash had arrived courtesy of the North Pacific Gyre when Koo paddled out of the twilight. I followed as she circled the mainland to dock on the western shore, out of sight of the cargo ship.

  “Passport, please,” I said as she heaved herself out of the kayak onto the dock I’d built with aluminium cans.

  “Funny man,” she replied. She’d never visited the Flotsamland mainland before, except in my dreams, but she’d spent many hours talking with me from her kayak as I kept myself interposed between the harvester and the shoreline it was supposed to devour. She wasn’t the most loyal of Midas employees, thankfully.

  Her skin shone like eggplant. She was taller than I’d thought, and her PFD had been concealing a curvaceous torso. Her face was cute, in a kewpie way—wide eyes, button nose, small mouth under spiky black hair.

  “We need to talk,” she said.

  “Come up to the office.” I pointed to my shack, perched atop Mount D
étritus.

  She followed me up the twenty-foot hill. We made ourselves comfortable on the cushions I’d crafted from sailcloth and kapok. “Tea?”

  She nodded. I cracked open the valve of one of the dozen propane tanks liberated from an abandoned pontoon boat, lit the jerry-rigged burner, and put on the water kettle.

  “Who’s the new guy?” I said.

  “His name is Goodale. He claims the home office isn’t going to pull us out until the cargo hold is full.”

  I fiddled with the teapot to cover my anxiety. “You can’t be serious. Do they know what the winter’s like in the North Pacific?”

  She pulled off her sweater. Even a small fire heated up the shack nicely. I’d built it in the shape of a teepee. “Midas has whole cities for processing the waste we harvest from the sea,” she said. “If they run out of product, the company goes belly-up.”

  The currents of the north Pacific circulate clockwise, aided by the prevailing winds, and the trash from surrounding shorelines is pushed toward my island as surely as water is drawn to the drain. It was at the centre of this gyre that Flotsamland had taken form over the last century, a solid disc of trash a mile wide and 100 feet thick. My little pied-á-terre represented a goldmine for a company such as Midas, and they loathed Fair Share Gaea for claiming its riches should be shared with the world’s poor.

  “Midas has already taken, what, eight-hundred million tons of trash out of the ocean in this area?” I said. “Why don’t they look somewhere else? I hear the Marshall Islands are nice and trashy.”

  The kettle boiled, and I poured the water onto the tea leaves. The smell of bergamot from the Earl Grey was lost on me. When you live on an island made of trash, you learn to block out your sense of smell.

  “Stupid question,” she said. “The better question is, what will they do to keep their big machines fed?”

  “You think I could be in danger?” I handed her tea in my favourite cup, with the logo of the cruise ship, Bacchanalia.

  “The first thing Goodale asked me was when we could expect the next day with good cloud cover and calm seas.”

  A CNN satellite had been watching Flotsamland since Fair Share Gaea landed me here in a PR stunt that culminated in the pending UN resolution to declare it a shared world resource. My job was to play chicken with the harvester by keeping my kayak, the FLS Scumbucket, interposed between the island and the harvester whenever the weather was calm enough for harvesting. Two years of playing dodge ’em had convinced me that the company was unwilling to risk public condemnation by harming me in front of the cameras.

  “I appreciate the warning,” I said. “But aren’t you taking a risk by telling me?”

  “I took this job because nobody was hiring marine biologists,” she said. “I thought I could continue my whale research. I had no idea how cutthroat this business is. These are evil people.”

  “And here we are, fighting over trash. Do you even feel like the world was wearing out?”

  She leaned back against a seat cushion I’d harvested from a 2017 Toyota roadster. “I can’t speak for the world, but my little piece of it is exhausted.”

  We sat in companionable silence until she began to snore softly. I woke her just before dawn so she could get back to her ship before first watch.

  §

  The next day brought a return of summer weather, clear and temperate. Only the falling water temperature and southerly declination of the sun foreshadowed the approach of winter. As the harvester chugged toward the island, I paddled out to intercept it.

  Goodale was at the con. As I spun the Scumbucket to face the harvester’s three-story-high scoop, he turned off his engines and snatched the microphone from its hook on the bridge.

  “You’re trespassing on Midas property,” he said, “and interfering with our legal business operations. You have ten minutes to get out of my way.” His voice was as deep as a humpback’s keening, and gravely. It had the forcefulness of a military order.

  Which put my hackles up. A military brat, I’d spent my childhood without a home to call my own, surrounded, raised, by order-followers and order-givers.

  I picked up my megaphone, made from a highway cone. “Beautiful day, huh? Have you introduced yourself to the TV audience?” I pointed to the sky.

  He exited the bridge and walked the narrow catwalk to the upper lip of the scoop, only twenty yards from my boat. I popped open my dry box and pulled out the flare pistol the CNN reporter had given me to draw their attention in the event of a confrontation.

  Goodale looked down on me. “How tough do you think you are, kid?”

  “Tough enough, I guess,” I said, with the bravado that came from confidence that my courage would not be tested.

  He leaned against the railing and lifted one foot onto the lower rung. “I bet you have a ten-second pitch for the cameras, right? All you pretty boys talk in sound bites.”

  The “pretty boy” comment cheered me up a bit. I recited, “The oceans belong to everyone, not just the countries with big guns. The North Pacific Coalition had no right to sell off the harvesting rights to this latitude. Flotsamland alone is worth billions, and we’re here to make sure the poor people of the world get their cut for a change.”

  “You’re an idiot, kid. A dangerous idiot. He stared at me like I was a dog to be cowered. “I didn’t come out here to play games. You want to avoid becoming recycled trash yourself, you’ll leave as soon as you can.”

  Although I’d expected him to threaten me, as others had before him, he spoke with that voice of a drill instructor, one that expected immediate and unswerving obedience. Dad had that kind of voice.

  The Midas crew and I had long before come to a tacit agreement on ground rules for ocean face-offs; if I could hold my position, they wouldn’t assail it. If they could get around me fairly, they could chew on Flotsamland for the rest of the day. None of us believed any more that trash or the cause warranted bloodshed. At least, until now.

  “Forecast calls for increasing cloud cover tonight,” Goodale said before turning away and returning to the bridge. As the harvester puttered back to the ship, I wondered if I had the guts to face a real assault. If they shipped Koo home, I was pretty sure the answer would be no.

  §

  The clouds did indeed arrive that night, thick and wet, but, as usual, the seas came up, too. The waves were tall and broad enough to toss Flotsamland around like a garbage-can lid in a tornado, and the harvester remained tied up to the cargo ship.

  The following morning, I awoke to the unmistakable smell of shit. Dread fell over me as I dressed and stepped outside.

  There, on Styrofoam Beach, lay a lifeless 15-foot-long baby humpback whale, a harpoon sticking out of its head like a toothpick from an olive. Its belly had been slit from stem to stern, and guts were spilled across one of my rain collection tarps. A message was painted on its side: “You’re next.”

  Goodale was watching me through binoculars from the ship’s superstructure. He waved derisively.

  A hundred yards offshore, a pod of humpies circled slowly, each surfacing in turn as it reached the nearest point to the island. The pod stayed there for the next two days before leaving. Each morning Koo paddled out and spent a couple of hours circling and singing along with it.

  §

  The Fair Share Gaea copter arrived on schedule that Sunday. Since waves were still percolating the island, it hovered and my usual contact, Pamela, zip-lined down.

  “I thought Midas would be gone already,” she said as she unclipped from the line.

  I explained the situation, wondering if I should have kept the whale to show her, instead of dumping it back into the ocean.

  “You can’t spend the winter out here,” she said, concerned, as she checked out my kingdom. I’d been segregating new trash with the thought of adding some acreage to the western shore—plastic in one pile, then glass bottles, cans and other metal containers, nets, and mile upon mile of monofilament line. A tall stack of driftwood was d
rying at the foot of Mount Détritus, and my rainwater collection tarps and barrels covered much of the northern plain.

  “I’ll stay as long as Goodale does,” I said, hoping my spoken commitment would bolster my resolve. I could almost hear Dad telling me, for the thousandth time, “Quitters never prosper.” In fact, I wasn’t sure my sister would even welcome me back on the mainland. She had her own place in San Diego, and my presence was an unwelcome reminder of our loss: both our parents were killed in the Congo War.

  “We didn’t bring food,” Pam said, “or clothes, or anything. We thought we were coming to pick you up.” I was taken aback when she confessed that the organisation didn’t have the money to make another trip for several months, even if the weather cooperated.